WHEN NATHANIEL was eighteen and had no place to go he joined the Coast Guard. They sent him to Maine where he served aboard a small cutter in Casco Bay. From day to day his life accelerated in company with white spray from a heaving blue sea gracefully turned back upon itself by a steel cutter, white except for a diagonal red stripe sleeking the bow—the guns white, the rivets the decks the transom the rails and even the sound of the engines white. Nathaniel had been born in a time when everything was expected. Having finished with the greatest war, no one could imagine another so it was lids off in bringing up children. They were raised to seek pleasures and believe myths. When these children were young men they obscenely smashed what they had obscenely believed. They did not understand the time from which they had come, and having let blind men lead them they then turned to the halt to lead them away. Naturally they went nowhere, having been taught that only the best of men are leaders. A generation so well treated can be fit only for early death. They were born in war, and those born in war will die in war.
Nathaniel was different. It would be hard indeed to say just how much his cutter pleased him. He was on duty for weeks at a time. In winter the rough sea and generous fog made him silent and content, teaching him that life on earth and the earth itself must rest in darkness, quiet, and shrouds of mist. In winter he learned to navigate by sight and sound precisely, to do dangerous things. He took part in the rescue of a freighter which had run aground. The sailors were Portuguese and African and they looked with special terror at the numbing sea and with wonder at the blue-jacketed Americans whose quarter they had come upon. Standing like a harpooner at the bow of the motorized whaleboat Nathaniel had pulled the frightened wet men in, leaning down far into the air above the sea and lifting each man with a smile. “Hello,” he said to each one as he hoisted him up like a baby. The Portuguese and the Africans could not understand how their rescuers could live so happily with so much ice, and arrive on time in a white ship with a red stripe and excellent coffee, as well as radar and guitars. They listened to opera that night, coming on the short wave directly from Milan.
In summer he grew dark and stronger and kept his uniform cleaner for the sake of women on the yachts. Baby girls on the dock watched him coiling lines or painting and asked him questions like: “Why do they put fish in a can?” which he answered and entered in the ship’s log. He was good at his work and he loved his ship, the bay, the sea, all the coasts and sandy cliffs, and most importantly his life, which he had suspected since he was a child would end before he was full grown. This was his genuine belief. He was not about to make it happen, and he would even fight the death he serenely knew he was born into, but not wildly. Wild fighting is often good, but in some ages it is simply undignified. So he spent each year as if it were the last, each day in fact, and his powers of observation increased. He was savage when he watched the cliffs and the sea breaking upon them as if they were a face and the sea slapping it. He watched yachts leaning fast their lines and booms lapping and kissing and the water climactically spraying the decks only to rivel away off the wood. This was a good America. This he loved, the America of ships and its deserted sea coast. He thought that Americans did not any more go down to the sea, nor to their prairies, and he thought this as he watched broken light dimming on the waves. Americans did not go down to the sea, and he saw few of them on the empty moonlike bright beaches in winter when he loved to walk.
He had never questioned an early death. He knew that his life was very strong and intense, that his sadnesses were extremely still and revealing, that the life he had on the Maine coast and off it was good, and that death was no more than leaving the coast.
One summer when the harbor was so full of white yachts they seemed only the plumage of the jetties and wharves, the cutter Madison was making its way out to sea. It was high off the water and unlike the yachts it traveled with perfect direction. It was on business and it knew and was the guardian of the waters. It was a father to the little ships and it moved out to the high seas where they seldom went. Nathaniel was standing on the bridge watching the jetty pass when he noticed a woman at the end near the great bell. He stood atop the white wall of his ship and looked at her, and turned to her direction as he passed. He saw her whitened face with only touches of a red glow from the new day, her suede coat with glittering square gold clasps, her deep violet stockings the artful pattern of which he could see even on the glaring bridge and which seemed to him the color of wallpaper in a very elegant house in Philadelphia. He wanted to tell her that, and he did when he found her two weeks later. She had watched his ship beaming away from her at three quarter face out to sea, halyards stretched musically, fittings aligned as if on compass course. His whole world fought eastward and rolled from side to side. Military ships move fast and appear to rush away. At that moment they entered into a compact.
The town was small; he found her easily. She was a lady, she was alone, and she wore a blue and white dress of lace with tight cylindrical sleeves and blooming cuffs. And her hair was the color of whitened gold. Whether by time, because of her great beauty, or by chance, this woman had found just the right way to dress. They walked down a dirt road between two fields of white grass and they exchanged information, although it seemed not important. “How old are you?” she said.
“I am thirty-four, just.”
She was married to a lawyer who was going to run for Congress, and she had finished Radcliffe when he, Nathaniel, was eight. But all this was by no means an appraisal or reappraisal, for their minds had been made up the day he saw her as he left for the sea. They talked as if they were engaged in lastminute instructions, hurriedly and without feeling or emphasis, as when stewardesses put on life jackets and pretend to blow them up.
She stopped and looked up at him. Her face was the color of white winter sunshine. It was peaceful, as peaceful or more so than what Nathaniel had learned was the peace of climate and the quiet of a warm day in March when the ponds are thawing and quite glistening. This woman’s face was glistening. “I,” she said, “should be very upset if I never see you again. If you go away now you will die, whenever you do, and I will die eventually and this meeting, about which I am otherwise very, very upset, will remain suspended here forever for no one ever to know, and I will have let my love spin and not engaged it. If love is the purest thing, and if I love, why then should I not love?”
The answer was not as clear as the imperative, and because they feared that they would never part he found a way. “I must be back at the ship at four. The whistle will blow and it will be heard on every part of the island. I know a barn with apple trees surrounding it. It overlooks the sea and the apples will be good by this time. We can go there, and sit, and do nothing. And when the whistle blows I will look at you, and rise, and run to the ship.”
They had apples for lunch and watched the sea. He remembered how she held the apples away from her so the juice would not stain her dress. He remembered how she sat, one leg upon the other. He remembered every detail of this woman, every small feature, every gesture, every move, breath, blink, silence, and sigh. She and her husband were not born in war, and they would live to be old. He would go to Vietnam, and not come back. She smelled fresh and delicious, and when she spoke she paused often and at just the right places to watch his face. He watched her for four hours. He never once touched her. They did not say much, only little things, about the tide, the sun, how hot it was. She was having her youngest day, he his oldest. When they realized they had been simply watching one another for hours they laughed. She had never looked into a man’s face for hours. He had never looked into a woman’s face at all, at least not in that way. When she had looked into her husband’s face, or before that at the faces of men she loved, it had been only momentary. Now she was looking into the eyes of a boy, a stranger, as if they were in another world where men and women lived in dreams and stared themselves into liquefaction.
And a few minutes after four o’clock the steam whistle of the cutter thundered off the sand cliffs and echoed through all the cow meadows and wheatfields of the island. They stood, she sunburnt, lighted, and dizzy, yet calm. Then he left and ran through a field of hay and nettles onto the road.
He was very young when he died but he had been expecting it. He left her in that place, that island on the Maine coast, never to see her again. She grew to be very old. Her life was long, and even when old she was a comely and then a handsome woman. People wondered why, but she would never tell them. She died with the secret with which her younger man had died years before. Early one spring she heard a steam claxon beating like the wings of a bird over the island, and she saw a young man asking her name (she paused to think of the beauty she had been, how full of the sun, how blond, how strong, how womanly and alive) and, as he was leaving and had turned to run down the hill, she called out over the waves battering the shore, in the sun of long ago, Elizabeth Ridinoure.